Academics

The UK’s academic institutions house some of the best medical minds in the world, and it’s both a pleasure and an honour to work alongside you, whether you’re at a university teaching hospital or an independent university. With the amount of data being produced by clinicians within our information systems, using it for the advancement of medical science is something we’re extremely passionate about.

It’s part of our values to support academic institutions throughout the research journey, helping to push the boundaries of scientific accomplishment to improve the health of the population and get research into working practice.

Our support of clinical research includes identifying potential participants for clinical trials, ensuring that their care teams know that they’re involved in a trial, making data available for you to use in your research and more. We also work with our clients to validate predictive algorithms and support novel research.

Healthcare is too important to stay the same, and as an innovative company, we want to do more than just improve our solutions – we want to work with academics to move health and care forwards to ensure better patient outcomes.

UCL partnership with Cerner UK

In 2016, UCL Institute of Digital Health signed a partnership with Cerner UK with the aim of generating more effective health informatics and better care for patients. The partnership is focused on closing the gap between research and practice, developing the future health care workforce and reducing time to market of digital health innovations.

The University of Leicester

The University of Leicester and Cerner have just completed a collaborative pilot project funded by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to explore potential for integrating environmental data such as weather and air pollution data into Cerner’s population health platform.

FAQs

One of the initial focuses of the partnership is to hold joint symposia between the research community and the healthcare community to accelerate sharing and adoption of research. An annual ePrescribing and medicines administration symposium has been held to show best practice and highlight opportunities for improvement.

Cerner supports the UCL health informatics MSc course through teaching, providing training materials dissertation prizes, and internships. Cerner and UCL have co-funded a UCL PhD student at UCL School of Pharmacy to explore how introducing electronic prescribing and medication administration in the UK hospital context changes workflow and communication around the use of medication. They are also looking at the extent to which staff try to make it fit existing work processes versus process redesign, and how these changes can facilitate improvements in the safety and quality of medication use. Read more.

Cerner supports research in many ways. We help clients with data for clinical research, we provide dedicated research solutions for data and running research programmes, we provide clinical research expertise, we develop predictive algorithms often in collaboration with our clients, we have partnerships with universities and fund research in them.

EHR systems are rich repositories for research on patients but also on workflows for better managing the process of healthcare. Our clients regularly use data from our platforms to support their research or the research of others.

In the USA, we have a service called HealthFacts where clients using Millennium® participate to share anonymous data for research purposes. HealthFacts contains over 42 million patient records and there have been over 300 publications using this data, and researchers in the UK can access data marts for research purposes. Data can be extracted in anonymous format for the UK market to support research.

Clients are researching new intelligence and predictive algorithms using this data, validating it in real populations, publishing and making it available to healthcare organisations at large.

Cerner’s PowerTrials solution works with Cerner Millennium EHR to help run and manage clinical trial protocols. Given that some 85 percent of trials are delayed due to accrual challenges, one key advantage is making use of the data to increase patient recruitment, with the solution matching research to patients and patients to research. Many healthcare professionals are unware of research at their institution – this solution creates this awareness and safeguards patients through flagging and alerting that they are on a trial. Study protocols are run in the EHR alongside normal care but with the opportunity to separate costs for individual research funding streams.